Stale Mac Pro lineup has pro users concerned

A recent rumor suggests Apple is considering discontinuing the Mac Pro. Though …

Apple’s top-of-the-line workstation, the Mac Pro, hasn’t been updated in well over a year, waiting on Intel’s delayed (and delayed again) Sandy Bridge-E based Xeon processors. The previous upgrade cycle was equally as long, nearly 18 months. Now, rumors are circulating that Apple management has been contemplating just pulling the plug on the Mac Pro altogether.

According to sources speaking to AppleInsider, a planned Mac Pro revision has been in the works for quite some time, but Apple management has been debating its fate as far back as May 2011. Sales of the high-end workstation have dropped considerably to both consumers and enterprise customers, and so profits have taken a nosedive.

Our own Peter Bright contends that the enterprise just isn’t interested in expensive workstations on the whole, and those on the bleeding edge of hardcore performance generally aren’t looking at a Mac. That theory seems to jibe with the rumored low sales figures for Mac Pros; portables are an increasingly large part of Apple's Mac sales—now nearly three-quarters—and desktop sales are primarily iMacs, according to Apple.

With sales so low and profits dwindling, is the Mac Pro just an expensive anachronism? It may be so for some users, especially those who value portability over raw power, don’t require upgrades, and whose expansion needs are served by the PCI Express-based Thunderbolt port Apple introduced across its line over the past year. A few users who previously relied on Mac Pros told Ars they have already traded in for the latest svelte MacBook Air models, for instance.

Not ready to give up

Hardcore Mac Pro users aren’t ready for Apple to give up on them just yet, though. We spoke to a number of professionals, largely in the content creation business, who told Ars that iMacs and Mac minis just aren’t the right solution for their needs.

Jon Alper, a Boston-based independent consultant for various media production interests, suggested he would prefer that his Mac Pros were pried from his cold, dead hands. “I just can't fathom functioning without them,” he told Ars. “I have two sitting on my desk right now, both mostly crunching video.”

Alper cut his teeth crunching numbers on Mac hardware at Harvard Medical School and later managed the IT needs of WGBH Boston's roughly 70-seat Interactive production division. “We rotated new Mac Pros in about every 12 months, and the older machines would get passed around to users that had older machines yet,” Alper said. “Any given machine would typically have a usable life of three to five years, and redeploying to new users was so simple—just pull the drive sled, swap, and redeploy.”

“Managing four terabytes of video data, running twelve to twenty-four hour long effects rendering batches—you just can’t really do that without a Mac Pro,” Alper said.

iMacs or Mac minis just aren’t a suitable replacement in production environments like WGBH Interactive, Apler insists. “Unless you have to pull the motherboard, Mac Pros are absurdly easy to work on,” Alper said. Swapping drives, adding RAM, or adding PCI Express cards or GPUs are relatively simple tasks on a Mac Pro; the same can't be said for even for most PC towers. “I just don't want to have to find a tech dexterous enough to pull the glass off an iMac with suction cups when just about anyone can pull and replace a drive in a Mac Pro,” he said.

For those at the bleeding edge of design, content creation, and scientific computing, the Mac Pro offers a number of advantages over Apple's other hardware. Dual multicore processors, enough slots for obscene amounts of RAM, the ability to run internal RAIDs, customizable GPUs, and the ability to expand functionality with PCI Express cards were all cited by users as reasons to keep the Mac Pro around.

Dr. David Chen of the Office of High Performance Computing and Communications at the National Library of Medicine told Ars that his small five-person team has relied exclusively on Mac Pros using a large Xsan file store. If Apple discontinues the Mac Pro “I’d miss not having an NVIDIA Quadro,” Chen said. “It’s got lots of memory and seems very bulletproof. And my coworker’s Pro has 64 gig of RAM; he is always going to want more memory.”

IT systems administrator and longtime Mac gamer Tom Johnson told Ars that video card options are critical for him on a personal level. “I have generally bought tower cases so I could replace the video card,” he said. “I expect to get five years out of the Mac, but only two out of a video card.”

“The other thing that is nice about Mac Pros is the dual processor. On the high end you get eight cores—I just don't see Apple putting that in any iMac,” Johnson said.

Other users appreciate Apple's use of higher-end Xeon processors. Web developer Enrique Ortiz, a former Microsoft Systems Engineer, noted that Xeons are typically reserved for server hardware. “There are very few systems equivalent to this machine in the Windows environment for the desktop,” he said. “In my experience, only the hardcore geeks could set up a great system like this running Windows or Linux.”

“If Apple kills the Mac Pro I would be devastated—Mac OS X is a cleaner environment for me and I’d really hate to go back,” Ortiz said.

Developers also often rely on Mac Pros to shave significant time off the complex app building process. “I use a Mac Pro at the office to build Mac and iPhone apps,” developer Raphael Sebbe said. “Working with Xcode, which is highly parallel, makes full use of the cores. My Mac Pro has eight cores—16 virtual ones—and does a fresh build about five times faster than on my MacBook Pro.”

Creating Windows switchers

Apple killing the Mac Pro could reverse some of the the switching trend that the company has relied on to expand its user base. Apple claims on nearly every earnings call that about half of new Mac buyers at its retail stores were previously PC users, and those switchers contribute to its quarterly Mac sales records.

Some diehard Mac users just won't switch back. “Could I switch to Windows? Yes, since Adobe makes its Creative Suite for Windows,” graphic designer Christopher Cobble told Ars. “Would I switch? Not even if I had to use a Mac mini.”

But other users wouldn't be able to get by with less expandable, less flexible iMacs or Mac minis. If Apple drops the Mac Pro, Alper said, “I’m gonna buy the biggest, fastest one I can find and just wait. And then hope Windows 8 is as awesome as it’s promised to be. Other Mac hardware just doesn’t have the flexibility and control that I need.”

And researchers in Chen's group are already contemplating a switch to Linux. “Our new post-doc is a Linux person, so he's ordering a pimped out machine from Colfax Systems,” he said. “Another coworker said if the Pros go, he's going Linux.”

"Dire" long-term consequences?

If Apple does decide to kill the Mac Pro, Alper believes the ill effects will extend beyond users' immediate needs. “The risk is dire, in my opinion,” he told Ars. “When Apple does things that make it easier for IT guys to say ‘no’ to Apple hardware, they do themselves a disservice. Things like the consumerization of Lion Server, they make it easier for the corporate Windows IT guy to just say ‘no,’ but when they have one of the best personal computers on the market, the Mac Pro, it makes it easier to say ‘yes.’”

“Employees have been gaining grassroots support for Macs by bringing in their own machines. Those guys in IT, they will use the Mac Pro's death as a reason to cut support,” Alper said.

Unfortunately, as iPhones and the iOS ecosystem has come to represent 70 percent of Apple's revenue, what little enterprise support it has offered in the past has waned. “Apple has been abandoning the enterprise market for years,” Dan Reshef, Director of Information Technology at CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, told Ars. “It began with the end of life of the XRAID, followed by the server class machines, and the Mac Pro could be next.”

“Apple has historically been a computer company driven by an interest to provide a platform for content creation,” Reshef continued. “However, Apple has a [recent] history of simplifying and eliminating products that were a drain on its resources. The enterprise products are likely a resource drain they'd prefer to allocate towards more profitable pursuits, even if it means damaging their own ecosystem and abandoning some of the content creators in the process.”

253 Reader Comments

Over time, Apple is becoming less and less reliant on PCs. Furthermore, the Mac Pro is increasingly becoming a niche product given the power available in the iMac and MacBook Pro. Honestly, the market demand for ultra-high end workstations isn't that large when compared to potential profits from the iPhone or new markets.

I can see Apple keeping the Mac Pro around for their development community. But given what they did with Final Cut Pro, I can also see them axing it early next year.

So, supposedly, pros want apple to sell a workstation with a consumer grade CPU (i7)? How would they handle the fact that i7 PCIe lanes are too limited for a true workstation (even more so with Thunderbolt ports taking some)?

Intel hasn't released this generation workstation CPUs, and Apple isn't going to cook up a mix of components from third parties they never worked with in order to produce a i7 workstation with Thunderbolt, USB3 etc. Apple is simply going to wait for intel release, and then build a classic workstation.

I personally hope for something bolder, like a mini workstation (only one CPU but the possibility of multiple video cards), with a reworked design for better heat dissipation.

The loss of the Mac Pro would be a big hit on content creation. And as someone pointed out, Adobe CS is on Windows as well.

I think at the end of the day, Apple doesn't care. A division that produces $1 billion a year in revenue and 10% margins is really attractive when you're a $10 billion/year company. It becomes much less attractive when you're a $100 billion / year company with 15% margins.

I've used Mac Pros since they first came out. Great machine. But in a desktop world where the hardwear (and even the OS) is becoming less and less relevant compared to the software tools, it's hard to justify the extra expense in all but the most extreme cases. When Apple switched to Intel processors and third-party motherboards, even the hardware became a commodity - the only thing that's "Apple" about the Mac Pro is the case. Why spend so much more just for a fancy case?

I'm in commercial graphics, and Adobe Creative Suite is almost completely platform-agnostic at this point. When I set up my own business in 2007, I did the math on workstations. Creative Suite was the same regardless of platform. An OpenType (cross-platform) font library was the same regardless of platform. Roughly-equivalent hardware to the performance I needed favored the PC by about $700 per workstation. That's a no-brainer in my world. I bought the PCs. If a freelancer can't use Windows 7, they aren't much of a computer user. I completely understand that they might *prefer* to use OSX, but in about a week they'll be just as productive in Windows 7, and more than one has decided that they, too, don't really care what computer they're using so long as it has Creative Suite installed. Perhaps it's different in the rendering/video-editing world. Highest-end PCs are approaching top-end MacPro prices in that performance class.

Apple just doesn't have a compelling business case anymore, at the business level. As a business owner, I'm not prepared to spend $700 more per workstation, just for a fancy case and keyboard. And then perpetuate that extra cost when machines need to be upgraded, as we're approaching now in my business.

My hunch that revenues are down on these items is because most in the market to purchase one are waiting for newer ones to come out. Why buy when 3 months later a newer version is released and your rig is a dinosaur? Also they are so ridiculously powerful that most don't need to upgrade ever 2 years.

I've used Mac Pros since they first came out. Great machine. But in a desktop world where the hardwear (and even the OS) is becoming less and less relevant compared to the software tools, it's hard to justify the extra expense in all but the most extreme cases. When Apple switched to Intel processors and third-party motherboards, even the hardware became a commodity - the only thing that's "Apple" about the Mac Pro is the case. Why spend so much more just for a fancy case?

I'm in commercial graphics, and Adobe Creative Suite is almost completely platform-agnostic at this point. When I set up my own business in 2007, I did the math on workstations. Creative Suite was the same regardless of platform. An OpenType (cross-platform) font library was the same regardless of platform. Roughly-equivalent hardware to the specs I needed favored the PC by about $700 per workstation. That's a no-brainer in my world. I bought the PCs. If a freelancer can't use Windows 7, they aren't much of a computer user. I completely understand that they might *prefer* to use OSX, but in about a week they'll be just as productive in Windows 7, and more than one has decided that they, too, don't really care what computer they're using so long as it has Creative Suite installed.

Apple just doesn't have a compelling business case anymore, at the business level. As a business owner, I'm not prepared to spend $700 more per workstation, just for a fancy case and keyboard. And then perpetuate that extra cost when machines need to be upgraded, as we're approaching now in my business.

There is still some (significant) difference in multithreading performance; but only for extreme workloads. I agree with you 100% for the "average" workload.

So, supposedly, pros want apple to sell a workstation with a consumer grade CPU (i7)? How would they handle the fact that i7 PCIe lanes are too limited for a true workstation (even more so with Thunderbolt ports taking some)?

Intel hasn't released this generation workstation CPUs, and Apple isn't going to cook up a mix of components from third parties they never worked with in order to produce a i7 workstation with Thunderbolt, USB3 etc. Apple is simply going to wait for intel release, and then build a classic workstation.

I personally hope for something bolder, like a mini workstation (only one CPU but the possibility of multiple video cards), with a reworked design for better heat dissipation.

An i7 with the right platform has more than enough PCIe bandwidth for nearly any use. The X58 (Tylersburg) core logic had 40 lanes of PCIe 2.0 bandwidth. The X79, which launches in a few weeks, has a lot of PCIe bandwidth as well. I can't remember the numbers right now, because I believe it's split between the chipset and the processor itself. Regardless, very few users would need more PCIe bandwidth than these two platforms offer.

I know it won't jive well with Apple's cores=power thing they've had going lately, but why not just move to the desktop variant of LGA2011? They can still throw a 6 core Core i7 in there and give it vastly more power than most desktops around. And everyone else will be in the same boat, no other workstation will have more power until Intel finally gets the server variant out anyway.

If they had have gotten it out last week it would have been perfect, like their previous deals with Intel, bring it on before the Nov 14th release date and have the most powerful desktop on the market. Of course, relations could have soured somewhat over the past few years with Apple's ARM love. And the design work involved to move to Intel's standard liquid cooling plus a single socket with the chance of dual socket in 6 months could have seemed like too much work for too little return.

Topevoli wrote:

"Swapping drives, adding RAM, or adding PCI Express cards or GPUs are relatively simple tasks on a Mac Pro; the same can't be said for even for most PC towers"

Does the Ram and video card seat itself? How could it be any easier on a Mac than a PC?

I wondered pretty hard about this too. It is slightly more difficult to take the side of the case off your average PC than a Mac Pro, and the internals generally aren't as nicely laid out, but we're talking a 5 second difference in time spent. On the other hand, if you need to swap out a PSU or a fan or anything not explicitly mentioned, it's much harder on the Mac Pro.

It sounds to me really like that guy hasn't touched a desktop in 15 years.

II'm in commercial graphics, and Adobe Creative Suite is almost completely platform-agnostic at this point. When I set up my own business in 2007, I did the math on workstations. Creative Suite was the same regardless of platform. An OpenType (cross-platform) font library was the same regardless of platform. Roughly-equivalent hardware to the specs I needed favored the PC by about $700 per workstation. That's a no-brainer in my world. I bought the PCs. If a freelancer can't use Windows 7, they aren't much of a computer user. I completely understand that they might *prefer* to use OSX, but in about a week they'll be just as productive in Windows 7, and more than one has decided that they, too, don't really care what computer they're using so long as it has Creative Suite installed. Perhaps it's different in the rendering/video-editing world. Highest-end PCs are approaching top-end MacPro prices in that performance class.

Apple just doesn't have a compelling business case anymore, at the business level. As a business owner, I'm not prepared to spend $700 more per workstation, just for a fancy case and keyboard. And then perpetuate that extra cost when machines need to be upgraded, as we're approaching now in my business.

Yeah, though in some instances (say, folks who use Cintiqs) the driver support on the OS X side is still much better than the Windows side. That being said, there's a lot of folks who use Adobe products that use Apple hardware out of habit/preference/tradition who could just as easily use Windows for the same job tasks. It'd be an adjustment, but not horrible.

I believe the significance of an available pro / expandable option for the Mac ecosystem far exceeds the sales footprint.

Dropping it would be quite counterproductive, whatever bean counters may say, IMHO.

I actually think that Apple is becoming less interested in the Mac ecosystem in general.

Also; don't discount the effect that axing the Mac Pro might have on sales of other Macs. They could very well go up, as at least some users who would have purchased a Mac Pro previously buy MacBook Pros instead (and upgrade more frequently because laptop hardware goes out of date a lot faster than workstation-class hardware.)

For app development, compile cycle time is pretty important, and I benefit greatly from 8 cores in this regard. I spend a lot of time tweaking/verifying/debugging/compiling/repeating. Last year, I upgraded my 2006-era 2xDual 2.66Ghz machine to 2xQuad 2.66Ghz chips to put some more legs into my "lesser" machine. A top of the line iMac will only get me incrementally past where I am now, but a 6,8 or 12 core Mac Pro will create a whole new reality speed wise for me. I also use 4 SSDs in a RAID 0 config to speed things up, which I suppose a RAID box could be a viable substitute at a premium price.

When it comes to web development, I typically have about 4 VMs running simultaneously under VMware. A clone of the production server running Linux, and several Windows VMs running a combination of XP and 7, and IE 6-9. The multiple cores help a lot, but this is really all about the RAM. When dealing with any UI design or Javascript issues, I prototype it against Safari, and when it is feeling finished, then I have to deal with all the IE versions to dial it in to work for all users. That is, make a change, upload then cycle through all browsers to make sure it works, then repeat until it actually works. (I used to have 4 computers and a KVM on my desk to accomplish this in the old days) And no, none of the DLL-swapping "all in one" IE solutions actually work...if you rely on this, you will end up with bugs that you cannot observe. An iMac or MBP, for me, is completely worthless for web development as the color is just wrong. Even if you accept the loss of gamut and get it calibrated as "color correct as possible", you still have the issue of color hyper saturation with the glossy screen tech. What am I going to do? Have a honkin' 27" iMac as my "secondary" monitor? Ridiculous.

The bottom line, if they don't continue making Mac Pros, I will have no alternative but to make a Hackintosh. The real gambit for Apple though, is losing all the high end content creation shops. These places won't take the gamble on deploying Hackintoshes, and will instead migrate to Adobe or Avid under Windows. That will be a terrible loss for Apple.

I run simplified models of atmospheric dynamics that I wrote in Obj-C++ / Cocoa on Mac Pros. Since the models sometimes run for a couple days, I am concerned about the strain of running them on, say, an iMac. Does anyone have thoughts about how well other Apple computers can hold up to sustained loads? And do any of them (besides the Mac Pro) come with ECC memory?

Does the Ram and video card seat itself? How could it be any easier on a Mac than a PC?

Access. How many PC towers have you seen where the RAM is blocked by the hard drive bays? Perhaps the video card is right next to the CPU cooler, and hence has to be wriggled out with great care?

The internals of the Mac Pro are designed in such a way that you have incredibly easy access to the drive sleds, the PCIe slots, and the RAM. Nothing gets in the way. NOTHING. Open the side, pull out the old RAM or video card, push in the new, put the side panel back in place, and you're done. This is one system where the traditional blood sacrifice is NOT necessary.

I don't see why Apple needs to cut the Mac Pro. It's not like they have to do much R&D with it. The case itself is great, and professional users aren't crying for a design refresh (like with the iPhone), so all they really need to do is just update the internal components once in a while.

Of course, why they're taking so long to do that, who knows. Unless Intel's pulling a "G5" here...

So, supposedly, pros want apple to sell a workstation with a consumer grade CPU (i7)? How would they handle the fact that i7 PCIe lanes are too limited for a true workstation (even more so with Thunderbolt ports taking some)?

This makes it sound like Apple is some sort of dinosaur commercial Unix vendor.

You don't have to be quite so limited. There's a very wide degree of difference between Apple's consumer products and it's Pro line. Most of that is very artificial and rather uneccessary.

This is why you dont buy power computer from a consumer gadet company. Apple is more interested in the end consumer buying 99 cent apps and updating their devices every 2 years. But Apple has a history on turning it backs to the people who support them.

II'm in commercial graphics, and Adobe Creative Suite is almost completely platform-agnostic at this point. ... And then perpetuate that extra cost when machines need to be upgraded, as we're approaching now in my business.

Yeah, though in some instances (say, folks who use Cintiqs) the driver support on the OS X side is still much better than the Windows side. That being said, there's a lot of folks who use Adobe products that use Apple hardware out of habit/preference/tradition who could just as easily use Windows for the same job tasks. It'd be an adjustment, but not horrible.

Folks using Apple-only products like Logic Pro, on the other hand...

Agreed. I usually get an eye-roll from a new artist when they first see/hear that we're a Windows-only shop, but other than the die-hard Apple fans, by the end of their first week they're usually saying, "You know, this really isn't bad at all", and from that point on they really don't care which OS is running underneath their workspace.

Absolutely there are going to be some edge cases where the only viable pro softwear is Apple-only, or a particular needed device works better on one platform or another. For that reason, I certainly hope that Apple *doesn't* kill off the Mac Pro line. But even in graphics, working in a non-Apple world isn't nearly the trouble it was years ago - or the trouble that many paint it to be. In my particular world, it's just a matter of learning a different "Finder", as it were. All the rest of the interaction is with Creative Suite, and that's exactly the same regardless of the underlying OS.

But given what they did with Final Cut Pro, I can also see them axing it early next year.

Heh? Final Cut X may have a different interface, but it also leverages multi-core processors in a way it's ancestors never ever did. FCX will take every core you can throw at it and more. Why the fuck would Apple go to that effort building out a foundation if they were just going to axe Mac Pros. It would have been a hell of a lot easier to just bolt the new FCX UI on top of a FCP foundation.

Does the Ram and video card seat itself? How could it be any easier on a Mac than a PC?

Access. How many PC towers have you seen where the RAM is blocked by the hard drive bays? Perhaps the video card is right next to the CPU cooler, and hence has to be wriggled out with great care?

The internals of the Mac Pro are designed in such a way that you have incredibly easy access to the drive sleds, the PCIe slots, and the RAM. Nothing gets in the way. NOTHING. Open the side, pull out the old RAM or video card, push in the new, put the side panel back in place, and you're done. This is one system where the traditional blood sacrifice is NOT necessary.

To add to that: It's two thumbscrews to replace the video card. No screws are involved in adding or replacing RAM, and you'll be able to put the daughter card they are on at working height while you do so. Hard drives are pull out the sled, seat new drive on sled, replace. The optical drives are slightly more complicated: You pull out the sled, remove the cables, unscrew the drive, replace, attach cables, then replace sled.

All of the above is open and easy to access. I've worked with hot-swap server parts harder to get at.

Almost everyone where I work uses Mac Pros. They use them for Maya, Photoshop, Final Cut, etc. And my boss, who has never used linux in his life (he's a big time artist Mac user, yeah one of 'those' guys), has been saying for the last 2 months that Apple has been alienating professionals, and he swears that 5 years from now the digital art industry will be mainly using linux. I never took him seriously, but perhaps he is right.

I think that one of the reasons that the sales numbers have dipped, is that when people see that the iMac and Macbook Pros undergo processor upgrades, some making them as fast as the low end Mac Pro models, they hold off on purchase, thinking that Apple will soon release updated Mac Pros.

I've been waiting since April to purchase a new Mac Pro for my business, and that is why I am in a holding pattern.

1) The current time since last refresh is still 50 days less than the previous refresh2) We're mid fiscal year for many businesses, meaning there's no money available to make the purchase en masse now and it’s too soon to start budgeting for next year3) A refresh now would be obsolete in a matter of months once Intel gets it house in order4) A Mac Pro would be considered a specialized device in any workstation and would not be subjected to the bureaucracy of an IT department (and that's just for net-new machines; upgrades and replacements have already been validated)

So long as Apple is not losing money on the line, then its safe to say a refresh will come when Apple (and the market) is ready. Even if they were to cut the line, you'd see a jacked up iMac hit the market months in advanced. They won't leave a vacuum.

Killing the Mac Pro would affect the entire Mac ecosystem. Why would consumers invest or even be interested in a "lesser" Mac (iMac & Mac Mini) if their schools, research institutes, recording studios, film production companies, 3D creation labs, etcetera, are moving away from the Mac?

I keep on thinking on my audio engineering school. Each classroom would have a fancy Mac Pro, for the teacher, and then there would be around a dozen iMacs for the students. If that Mac Pro becomes a Dell, so will the iMacs.

I dont do video editing, but It just seems like they made the mac pro too good.

a 12 core machine (24 virtual cores) with maxed out ram and an SSD would not be out dated for like 10 years!

... unless processors make a quantum leap.

In the movie rendering / modelling / rendering business, I can imagine them buying new hardware, but the mac pro pretty much out classes anything for consumers right now, and probably will do for years. I don't think there will be a 12 core iMac along any time soon...